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#Snapchat Widens the #Net with Profile #URLs

Snapchat started out in life as service that was meant to be used between friends. Bored on the train? Snap yourself making a stupid face and send it to someone who you think it will amuse, or if you're a jerk, send it to everyone. Gradually, through the introduction of Live Stories, it's become more widespread, and now it's not uncommon to add users that you don't even know.

It's no accident, Snapchat have been trying to strengthen this arm of the service for some time now, and the latest step in that direction is the addition of profile URLs. With the latest update, the 'Add Friends' screen contains an option to 'Share Username', which then gives you a unique URL which you can copy out of the app and send to anyone, or just share on Facebook, Twitter or wherever else. Tapping one of these URLs on a mobile device brings up a little account preview, complete with an 'Add' button.

It makes sense, most social media platforms dole out unique URLs as standard, and it's not uncommon to find that people will use the 'About Me' section on some or all of their profiles to list URLs to all the others. Even on Tinder, many people eschew any actual personal information in favor of a link to their Instagram (Facebook and Twitter are a bit too personal to share on a dating app, presumably).

With Snapchat, this has the added benefit of making it distinctly easier to add famous faces on the platform, something which was relegated to user searching before, which is obviously pretty cluttered thanks to all the fake profiles made by people who have obviously exhausted every other pass-time it is humanely possible to undertake. QR snapcodes do offer a similar kind of function, but they are far from foolproof, and not so easy to share.

More to the point, snapcodes and Snapchat's other adding functions might be straightforward enough to grasp for regular users, but not so much for people new to the service. URL sharing is comparatively easy to understand for everyone, neophyte or otherwise. Once again, this is designed so that profiles can be shared on other social media platforms, something which could, and likely will, increase the influx of new users to the app.

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